NAME

/etc/and.priorities - priority database for the auto nice daemon.

VERSION

This manual page documents and.priorities for and version 1.2.1.

DESCRIPTION

This is the priority database file for and. It stores (user, group,
command, parent, nicelevels) tuples (hereafter called entries) to
determine the new nice level (or the kill signal, for that matter) when
a job reaches one of the time limits defined in /etc/and.conf. (See
lv1time, lv2time, and lv3time on the and.conf manual page for details.)
See the affinity setting in /etc/and.conf for how ambiguities between
the fields (user, group, command, parent) are dealt with when searching
the database to determine the new nice level for a job. Note that if
more than one entry matches with the same accuracy (e.g. with a
parent= entry and an ancestor= entry), the lastentrywins!
Comments start with a # in the firstcolumn. Empty lines are ignored.
Unlike with other configuration files, lines cannotbeconcatenated
with a backslash. Furthermore, this file is casesensitive.and allows for host-specific sections in the configuration file. These
work as lines of the form onsomehost and work as follows: the parser
determines if the host name (as returned by gethostname) matches the
extended regular expression that follows the on keyword. If it does, it
just keeps processing the file as if nothing had happened. If it does
not match, however, everything up to the next on keyword is skipped. So
if you want to end a host-specific section, you must write on.*
(which matches all hosts) to switch back to normal.
Don’t forget to kill-HUP the auto nice daemon to enable the changes.

SETTINGS

A valid entry consists of a line of six columns, separated by one or
more spaces. These columns are: (in that order)
user The user ID the command is running under. May be a user name
(which will be looked up in the password file and, if enabled, via
NIS), or a numeric user ID, or an asterisk for any user.
group
The group ID the command is running under. May be a group name
(which will be looked up in the group file and again, if enabled,
via NIS), or a numeric group ID, or an asterisk for any group.
command
The name of the command, without path. May be a command, a regular
expression to match multiple commands, or an asterisk for any
command. Note that "foobar" will not match "/usr/bin/foobar" -
you probably mean ".*foobar" or even ".*foobar.*".
parent
There are two modes of operation for the parent field, determined
by a keyword: parent=foobar will match if a process’ direct parent
process matches the command or regular expression after the equal
sign, whereas ancestor=foobar will match if any ancestor process
matches. After the keyword and the equal sign goes the name of the
parent process, without path. May be a command, a regular
expression to match multiple commands, or an asterisk for any
command. (You can just use the asterisk if you want to ignore
parents for this entry.) Note that again "foobar" will not match
"/usr/bin/foobar", as with command.
nicelevel1
The nice level after lv1time CPU time was used by the command.
Positive numbers and 0 are interpreted as nice levels; negative
numbers are interpreted as signals to be sent to the command. A
"nice level" of 19 will almost stop the job, -9 will actually kill
it. (Like in kill -9.) lv1time can be set in /etc/and.confnicelevel2
Same but after lv2time.
nicelevel3
Same but after lv3time.